“Can you see that?” I say to Semper. “That strange rock at the horizon?”
Semper shades his eyes and squints. “I’m afraid I don’t,” he says. “Too much time studying old manuscripts, I guess.”
“Just there, up against the rising moon.”
Semper shakes his head, but at the same time a woman high above us on the immense mainmast gives out a cry, pointing. Semper puts two fingers to his knife and raises his eyebrows. “There
is
something out there,” he says. He calls up to the lookouts above them and points. Tracers leap out from the ship from mages in the rigging.
“A relic?”
“Something,” Semper nods. “It’s got a very large power signature. They’re sending over a podship.” One of the small ships breaks formation and shoots out toward the spire.
Semper keeps his fingers on his knife, listening. “I’m sorry you’re not able to hear the conversation.” Semper cocks his head to the side, looking very much like Gravhnal for a moment. “It’s certainly a glyph of some kind, just based on the signature. It could be quite a find.”
We wait, and I get up and pace by the rail. Part of me is excited by any find—it’s what I do, right? Part of me is incredibly jealous that whatever is out there is about to become Akarii property.
After a few minutes we can see the podship returning. It comes in and hovers low over the observation platform as a mage jumps down and runs below.
“It must be something significant,” Semper says, standing. He has a startled look. “Nadrune herself is going over. Don't be surprised if she asks you to join her—she’ll want to have you at her side to draw attention to the find.”
A number of mages come up on deck then, followed by a large number of impeccably wrapped-and-feathered servants and lastly Nadrune herself is lifted up in a palanquin draped in feathers and silk. The porters walk her over near to where the podship hovers and set her down. As she parts the gauzy curtains and emerges, she looks over to where we’re standing.
“Hulgliev!” Her voice boomed across to us, cutting easily through the wind. “You will join me!” It’s not exactly a request, I note. I look at Semper. He shrugs, and we walk over to join the crowd. The podship rolls out a rope ladder, since there’s no real place for it to land here, and the servants begin to argue among themselves. I can’t really understand what they’re saying, since they’re all speaking some sort of high-pitched chirping dialect that’s accompanied by sharp gestures. But Nadrune brushes them aside.
“Nonsense,” she says. “Stop your snipping! It is quite suitable.” Then she hauls herself quickly up the ladder, moving really fast for her size. The servants look at each other and then scramble to be the first one up behind her. Several mages follow, folding themselves into what was quickly becoming a very small podship.
I climb up behind them all, then, and can’t help grinning when I see how tightly they’re all packed in there, and how disheveled they already looked—like too many chickens in too small of a henhouse. Their wraps are already streaked with the grime of the hold. Feathers are getting bent and broken, and tiaras are askew. The servants are crowding to be close to Nadrune and yet not too close, since the clothes of the ones that are touching her are starting to smolder.
Nadrune, though, looks perfectly comfortable sitting cross-legged on the floor in the center.
I grab a harness and clip onto the combat netting just outside the hatch. Nadrune nods to me. “Did you bring Semper as well? Lasser’s Glorious Prick, Semper, get up here!” she yells.
Semper winces, and then approaches the ladder with a pinched expression on his face. The thin man grips the swaying rungs, and climbs slowly and carefully with his eyes tightly closed. “Right here,” Nadrune says, shooing the servants aside and patting a clear space beside her. “You can make it through a quick flight.” Semper climbs in, crouches and moves unsteadily through the servants to sit down next to her. He spreads the palms of his trembling hands flat on the floor of the podship, and keeps his eyes squeezed shut.
The bright deck of the city ship falls away from us then, as the podship lifts into the air, and we speed through the gathering dusk and rushing ocean wind. The podship grows hot from Nadrune’s inner fire, and the servants start to sweat.
As we approach the spire, it’s taller than it looked from the ship. It rises up out of the water like a jutting horn of some enormous herd animal, curving and twisting strangely in the air, and then fracturing into a series of cliffs and ledges. The wind and the waves have eaten away at it, and parts of it have collapsed into the sea exposing the lighter, rough rock beneath the surface. Horned seals cluster at the base of it, sprawling upon the piles of loose rock there.
The podship circles, and the pilot looks for a place to land. I can’t sense anything there, thanks to the collar, but I watch the way the lights from the ship reflect from something large and metallic on the side of a wide ledge, near the uppermost peak.
There’s no place for the ship to put down. I climb across the netting to the front of the ship and gesture to the pilot—who startles, evidently not expecting to see a large, furred face in the window—to get close enough that I can jump across. The pilot confers with someone from the hold, and then nods. She pulls the ship up close to the spire, low down so she’s out of the wind.
I crouch and leap, sail across the gap and skid into the loose, crumbling rock there.
The seals below all scatter.
Solid ground! Damn, I missed it. Even if it is in the middle of all this water.
Back at the ship, Nadrune is in the doorway. She yells back into the hold, and then she too launches herself across the gap. She floats slowly through the air, glowing like a small moon, and then touches down lightly beside me.
There’s more movement from the hold, and a servant with a bent tiara looks out, and then ducks back in. After another minute he comes to the door again and shakes his head.
Nadrune sighs. “He’s a good sage, but the man needs to get out more often.” She cups her hands around her mouth and yells “Semper! I require you to attend me! Now!”
There is more movement within, and then two servants appear holding a struggling Semper between them. They make as if to throw him across the gap, but he struggles and fights, punching one of them in the eye and knocking the other servant off his feet. I can see his eyes are wide with fear, and he breaks loose of the other servant and dives back into the ship.
“I’ll get him,” I say.
I jump back across the gap, duck into the hold, delicately lift Semper over my shoulder and then leap back across.
Semper’s hands are clenched in my fur with a death grip. “I don’t care what she wants! I’m not going!” he shouts through clenched teeth. “She can go fuck herself!”
“I have some news for you, my friend,” I say. I put him down gently because his legs are shaking so much. He shuffles his feet in the loose gravel and looks up and me. I turn him around to face Nadrune, who’s glaring at him.
He looks sheepish and bows stiffly. “Khalee,” he says.
“It’s this way,” Nadrune frowns, pointing upwards and shaking her head. “And I expect you to keep up.” She finds a handhold and a foothold, and climbs. The servants watch her from the hold with petrified looks on their pale faces, and chirp back to the pilot, who raises the ship to keep even with her.
“I won’t let you fall,” I say.
Semper swallows, studies my face with his two-color eyes, and then nods. He grasps the handhold that Nadrune used, and begins to pull himself up behind her.
Nadrune is already twenty feet above us. She’s only using her arms now, and is moving fast.
We work our way around up the spire, going from ledge to ledge. Below us, the horned seals climb back onto their rocks and watch us, drowsily. Nadrune stays ahead, climbing aggressively and seemingly without effort. Servants lean out of the hold. Someone is bathing her in aether. Others chirp at her and point uselessly at ledges and outcroppings of rock, but she ignores them, and eventually the wind is too strong again and the podship needs to back off some. When her way is blocked, she coughs out red gouts of flame that blast rock away. When she needs footholds or handholds, she puts her face near to the surface of the stone and exhales, and her breath liquefies it enough for her to scoop out sections with her bare hands. At each ledge, Semper collapses into an awkward pile of limbs, so I end up climbing with one arm around him. We move slowly, and he keeps his eyes carefully averted from the sea below.
For that matter, I do too.
Each time we work out way into the wind side of the spire, I study as much as I can see of the object above us. It’s large and silver, a big globe, at least twice my height in size. It looks like it hangs from the ledge, which makes me worry whenever we’re right underneath it.
There are features or carvings on it that come clearer as we get higher.
It’s a large, impassive face, mostly humanoid if you excuse the third eye that lies in the center of its high forehead. It has flat, broad lips of smooth metal, upswept cheekbones and fat cheeks. The nose is long and aquiline, and the eyes are large and prominent though they’re all closed. Its head is wrapped in a high metal helm that has glyphs etched in circular, undulating lines all across its surface.
“It’s not attached to the cliff,” I point out. It’s just hovering there in the air, unaffected by the wet gusts of wind that was starting to smell like rain. It looks female to me. And it’s nearly identical to the Twin Sisters already housed at Tamaranth, at the top of the Alabaster Tower.
The very ones that rose up out of the sea for Dekheret four hundred years ago.
“Is it?” Nadrune looks at Semper. “Is it one?” Her fiery eyes are burning intensely.
Semper shakes his head. “I need to get closer to tell for certain.”
“It looks like a Sister,” I say.
“Yes,” Nadrune says. “Yes it certainly does, doesn’t it?” She leaps straight up the rock to the uppermost ledge above, landing easily on her feet. The spire is so narrow I have to carry Semper the rest of the way. When we reach the ledge Nadrune is on her large stomach, leaning over the edge and staring at the relic. The head lies sideways to us and we stare down into one large, oblong ear. Nadrune looks like she’s ready to whisper it a secret, though I can’t imagine her actually whispering.
She reaches out a hand to touch it but then draws it back and looks at Semper.
We trade places. Semper lies down on the ledge and I hold his legs for him. While he curses up a streak, I lower him down over the edge until he can place his hands flat on the head.
He keeps his eyes closed for a long minute, his lips moving silently, and then he opens them and traces some of the glyphs on the metal surface. They light up in in response to his touch.
Off in the distance I can hear what sounds like explosions, but I’m not sure they’re related.
Each of the head’s glyphs is crisp, as though the whole thing had been freshly carved from the metal minutes before. It doesn’t look like something that has been here for hundreds of years.
But then some relics are like that.
I haul him back up. He sits and lets the blood drain back into his legs, and then reaches for Nadrune’s hand. He takes a deep breath. “Congratulations, Khalee,” he says solemnly, inclining his head. “You have led us to a third Sister! You are truly among the blessed!”
The hair stands up on my neck ridges and probably goes white. I sit down next to him, and take a deep breath. Nadrune lights up like a beacon. “By Quimbii’s Knife,” she whispers, and sparks trickle from her eyes. The rain falling lightly now on her shoulders turns to steam.
There’s a look of both wonder and triumph on her face.
Here’s the short version of the story: four hundred years ago, Dekheret was outcast by her family and she wandered the ocean in a small boat, starving and destitute. When she came to Acheron’s Teeth, deep in the southern continent, two great silver heads rose up from the water and spoke to her. They told her to unite the families, found the Lunar Council, to create the Tel Kharan and raise up the great city of Tilhtinora. Now, the Sisters are in Tamaranth, and the Chancellor there supposedly consults them, though I couldn’t tell you if that actually happens or not.
Every third year like clockwork, though, the great mouths on the heads open, and they sing, and the crazy chanting can be heard across all of Tamaranth. I’ve heard it myself.
I’ve seen them once, too, and they’re hard to forget.
“A Hulgliev by my side, and now a Sister,” Nadrune says. “A Sister! Lasser’s Great and Glorious Member! If anyone doubted me before, they won’t doubt me now! Even my father will have to support me.” She leans over to study it again. “It will speak. It must speak to us, Semper. How do we ensure it?”
Semper shakes his head. “Many of us have studied the Sisters, khalee. No one knows what inspires them. They speak to whom they wish, when they are ready, and about whatever it is they wish to discuss.”
She frowns. “We will carry it with us on the ship as we move into Tamaranth, and I myself will set it next to the twins in the Alabaster Tower. I will sit with it night and day until it is ready,” she says fiercely.
She places her hand on her knife. “I require a transport to bring this relic back to the ship immediately,” she says into the air. “Get that podship back here now.”
She frowns, and the light in her eyes flickers. “What? By whom? I don’t care what Bakron told you! I should have been notified at once! I will return immediately.”
She takes her hand from the blade and looks at Semper. Her clothes are starting to smoke. “Bring the Sister to the ship, and let nothing, and no one, prevent you from securing it, Semper or I will flay you myself, personally. Hulgliev, you will stand by my sage and ensure there is no trouble. There is some skirmish, a force sent from Tamaranth, and that fool Bakron is trying to command my own mages without me.” She looks at the two of them intently, and lowers her voice. “Semper, this is perhaps the most important thing I have ever asked of you. Do not fail me.”